Remembering Women's Activism by Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Vera Mackie

Reviewed by: Remembering Women's Activism by Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Vera Mackie Karen Hunt Crozier-De Rosa, Sharon, and Vera Mackie – Remembering Women's Activism. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019. Pp. 254. In Britain, the year 2018 saw the commemoration of the centenary of the partial enfranchisement of women. Overwhelmed by a tsunami of purple, white, and green (the colours of the militant Women's Social & Political Union), the complex story of the evolving campaign for women's suffrage was drowned in local and national celebrations that often had little to do with the complexities of history. A diverse and evolving campaign had been overwhelmed by a polarized suffragist-suffragette narrative. One family name—Pankhurst—had come to stand for a vast array of women whose activism in pursuit of citizenship took many forms. Despite the hard work of suffrage historians in scholarly and popular works, the centenary of some women winning the right to vote was "remembered" in ways which flattened, simplified, and in the end too-often misrepresented an important example of women's activism. So, a book entitled Remembering Women's Activism is timely if we are to understand collective acts of remembering such as Vote100 (as the British commemorations were branded). Sharon Crozier-De Rosa and Vera Mackie explore the gendered dimensions of history and memory through a series of well-chosen case studies. They reveal absences in gendered memory as well as how memories are constantly being reinterpreted, often diverging in significant ways from the initial acts of remembering. Their discussion shows how gender informs and shapes our understandings of history and memory as it intersects with a whole range of other structures of power. They do this by focusing on a variety of what they term "mnemonic practices" such as street names, statues, banknotes, and other forms of material culture together with all sorts of mass media. A final example explores a particular "embodied political practice," the street demonstration inspired by historicizing the Women's Marches of 2017. The text is illustrated by the authors' photos, which supplement their dissection of the various representations of women activists and the sites of their activism. Women's activism is defined here as challenges to the gendered status quo. The choice of case studies makes this book, drawing on examples from a range of places and times. They centre on women's suffrage, women who took part in violent anticolonial struggles, women workers and those who fought to improve their working conditions, and survivors of militarized sexual violence in the Second World War and the campaign for reparations from the Japanese government. For this reader, the least familiar stories and memorials provoked the most thought and provided examples of the kind of memorializing interventions that could be deployed in other places and in relation to other forms of women's activism. Some responses are particularly striking. One example concerns the terrible fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York in 1911 that took the lives of 146 mainly women garment workers trapped in a factory whose doors had been locked partly to prevent access to union organizers. Unable to flee from a floor well beyond the reach of the fireman's ladders and with no fire escape, many jumped to their deaths. A number of memorials have sought to remember the victims and the [End Page 481] ensuing campaign to reform working conditions. A simple but powerful idea is the annual chalking of the name and age of every victim of the fire on the pavement outside their individual tenement addresses. The chalk inscriptions are gradually worn away over the ensuing weeks by weather and passing pedestrians only for the memorial to be renewed the following year. Here is a physical reminder of the way in which the memory of the Triangle fire has alternately waned and been revived over the years as well as the fact that for many decades the victims were nameless. This infamous fire continues to resonate across the world, for example, with the collapse in 2013 of a Dhaka garment factory complex in which well over 1,200 workers were killed. Both examples prompted women's...

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